By Whom Was The First Email Written?

Although it is hard to say exactly who wrote and sent the first penpal, we do know a lot about the first email in general. It is believed to have been sent by a man names Ray Tomlinson in 1971. Ray Tomlinson was a computer engineer. The first email was a text message to himself. The email was sent from one computer to another computer sitting right beside it in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it traveled via ARPANET, a network of computers that was the precursor to the Internet. Working for Bolt Beranek and Newman (the company picked by the U.S. Defense Department to build ARPANET), Tomlinson had been fooling around with two programs called SNDMSG and READMAIL, which allowed users to leave messages for one another on the same machine. He applied the idea behind these programs to a third program called CYPNET, which allowed users to send and receive files between computers. The combined technology allowed people to send and receive files that could be appended between different machines.